Middling exits in sales analytics

Companies developing predictive analytics for sales teams have done a poor job of predicting their own exit opportunities. In this corner of the sales-software market, several companies have exited, although most appear to be ‘acqui-hires,’ including the most recent deal, Anaplan’s acquisition of Mintigo.

Although Anaplan didn’t disclose the terms of its first acquisition as a public company, we expect the total came in below the $50m that Mintigo raised from investors. Anaplan only disclosed the acquisition during its earnings call, emphasizing that the purchase was done to land the target’s 50 employees, not for its B2B sales software. That would be a familiar outcome for the half dozen or so companies that launched earlier this decade to develop predictive analytics for B2B sales.

In 2015, LinkedIn acquired Fliptop to bolster the development team around its Sales Navigator product; a year later, eBay picked up the team that developed the now-defunct SalesPredict product; and in 2017 ESW Capital, a bargain-hunting PE firm, scooped up Infer. The exception, so far, is Lattice Engines, a growing business that sold to Dunn & Bradstreet at a respectable multiple (subscribers to 451 Research‘s M&A KnowledgeBase can access our estimate of that deal here).

For the remaining vendors in the space, the exit potential looks a bit brighter. Most have evolved, if not outright pivoted, beyond stand-alone sales analytics. Everstring relaunched a little over a year ago as a provider of business data, 6Sense is expanding into a marketing suite on top of its intent data, and Leadspace is moving into sales analytics from its foundation of sales data management. Topline growth at these companies could compel business data providers or enterprise software companies to make more strategic acquisitions of sales analytics than we’ve seen so far.